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Election night progress

Prior to the election, I'd been following fivethirtyeight.com, which is probably the most accurate tracking website out there. I don't know what their secret is, but they're good. Really good. In any case, they had projected Obama to have a 90%+ chance to win, so his re-election was no surprise to me and I was very glad that Mittens is on his way back to Kolob.

But it wasn't Obama's re-election that had me feeling great; it was all the other progressive victories. It was a good night:

Todd Akin, infamous for his boneheaded remark that women are unlikely to get pregnant in the case of "legitimate rape", was soundly defeated. The fact that he was defeated by a woman makes it that much sweeter.

Richard Mourdock, with his clumsy remark about pregnancy resulting from rape being something "God intended to happen", was also defeated

Maine and Maryland became the first two states to legalize gay marriage by popular vote.

Floridians rejected an amendment to the state constitution that would have allowed taxpayer money to go to religious organizations.

Washington state and Colorado passed measures to legalize weed. Although it's a symbolic victory since it's still illegal at the federal level, it shows progress in the minds of the people.*

On the downside, Pete Stark, the only congressman who is openly atheist, appears to have lost his seat to someone who used religion as a wedge. On the plus side though, another atheist, Kyrsten Sinema, looks on track for a narrow victory in Arizona.

And by the way, I think that Obama's re-election is pretty remarkable if for no other reason than the fact that Romney had the most-watched news network campaigning for him, which is perhaps no better represented than by this graph on how the news networks covered candidate speeches the weekend prior to the election:

*For the record, I do not smoke weed. But I think that people who want to ought to be free to do so, rather than tossed into our overcrowded penal system.